My new variety of lily plant originated as a seedling selected from a group of seedlings planted by me at Sandy, Oreg., and resulting from a crossing which I made by using as the seed parent a very short, cream-colored clonal selection from the pastel hybrid strain, and as the pollen parent a red-orange flowered seedling from `Connecticut Lemonglow`.times.`Red Carpet` (both unpatented), the objective of this crossing being the production of lilies in shades of pink and peach well suited to forcing for pot plant production out-of-season, a characteristic heretofore unknown in the lily breeding art.
This particular seedling was selected for propagation and test because of its short stature and medium sized flowers of deep peach-pink coloration and spotlessness and I reproduced the selected seedling by bulb scale propagation and by natural propagation from bulblets with very satisfactory results and subsequently this new plant was propagated through several successive generations by me and under my direction, which demonstrated that the novel and distinctive characteristics of the new variety hold true under asexual propagation from generation to generation and appear to be firmly fixed.
Our work with this new variety shows that it remains short and is not overly susceptible to bud abortion when forced into flower out-of-season as a pot plant and in addition, we have found that the clone possesses to a high degree the desirable characteristics of hybrid vigor, great hardiness, and disease resistance, possessing all of the desirable characteristics of excellence of form, color, and habit, as observed at Sandy, Oreg.
We have found the new variety to be well suited to forcing out-of-season when the bulbs are dug at the appropriate time and properly precooled. For example, October-dug bulbs, properly precooled and potted in January, will flower under glass in western Oregon in an average of sixty-five to seventy-five days, with no supplemental lighting and at moderate greenhouse temperatures.